Journals A View To Family Epic, National Identity

BOOKS

If ours were still a culture that cared about books, the arrival of a new Jim Harrison novel would be awaited as eagerly as were those of Hemingway generations ago.

Harrison, several of whose novels, including Legends of the Fall, have been filmed, is a great storyteller. More important, he writes about who we are as a people, altogether too rare an attempt in contemporary American fiction.

In The Road Home, he explores the national identity through a family of comfortably off Midwesterners, all of whom keep journals. The patriarch is John Northridge, who grew up at the turn of the centuryHe attended the Chicago Art Institute but recognized his limitations and settled into gentleman farming and real estate.

Northridge is dictatorial, mercurial, but his voice is often wise and humorous. Moreover his early artistic yearnings left their mark. "Art is at the core of our most intimate being and a part of the nature of things as surely as is a tree, a lake, a cloud. When we ignore it, even as spectators, we deaden ourselves in this brief transit."

Also, Northridge has known tragedy -- his older son, John Wesley, was killed as a pilot in the Korean War.

One journal belongs to Northridge's younger, somewhat distant son, Paul; another to Naomi, John Wesley's widow.

The most moving and worldly of the journals is that of Dalva, John Wesley's daughter; the most amusing is that of Nelse, Dalva's illegitimate son, whom she gave up for adoption when he was born and she was only 15. Now 30, Nelse is going in search of his mother.

Northridge's mother was a Sioux, and their Indian blood deepens the perspective of the whole family. It also affects their relationships with the Indians who continue to move through their lives.

The result is a family story with epic dimensions. The loosely structured narrarive is given compelling momentum by the wealth of anecdotes each family member recounts, many of which have the visceral, pungent quality we associate with the violence of nature.

The main narrative is Nelse's search for his birth mother, but this is a framework in which many little stories take place. Nelse, as it happens, is a naturalist engaged in phenology, the study of recurrent natural phenomena as related to time and climate.

Although all the events in the novel have their particularity, the overall effect is, to use Nelse's word, phenological -- that of creatures moving through cycles that seem almost mystically beyond their control.

The sheer poetic power of Harrison's prose enthralls. Listen to one of Northridge's musings: "I have never viewed nature as a homily to prod our tired asses toward heaven, or as a relief from grooming the fleas off each other's skins. ... The earth was not made for our solace, but for her own evolving magnificence of which we are a small part."As you read Harrison, you sense that what he tells you about his characters is a fraction of what he knows. They are so alive, so involving because they reflect an enormous richness of experience.

As soon as I finished The Road Home, I began Dalva, in which Harrison introduced all these characters a decade ago. What a pleasure to have discovered a great American writer and to know how much there is to read.